• 0 Posts
  • 78 Comments
Joined 9 days ago
cake
Cake day: March 31st, 2025

help-circle

  • Well, often they know it´s hard to estimate, but the entire corporate system is built around having things done by a certain date, your time costs money and payments are usually linked to those dates. They don´t really have a choice but to make a planning based on the estimates you give and monitor the progress so they can give the proper level of panic to their bosses. Of course, software has always been a disaster with estimates and attempts to tame the chaos haven´t been that successful.

    I usually make a ridiculously detailed list of all tasks. ¨Add button A on screen. Discuss details: 2 hours. Interface work: 0.5 hour. Code work: 2 hours. Database work: 2 hours. Testing: 2 hours. FAT: 2 hours. Changes after FAT: 1 hour. SAT: 2 hour. Test script: 1 hour. Update documentation: 2 hours. Add button B … ¨ Put it all in an excel sheet and summarize. Most PMs don´t even want to start arguing a list like that, and it seems to make a reasonably good estimate for me.





  • It’s an attempt to get a handle on things and trying to avoid situations such as:

    “Oh, I was struck on that point for the last 3 months. I reinvented the wheel 2 times and now it works.”

    “And now we’re 3 months behind schedule. Why didn’t you ask anybody?”

    “Yeah, I didn’t want to bother anyone. But I did put in on the timesheets.”

    “It says ‘working on project’.”

    And that’s how regular project update meetings get scheduled, and a bunch of messages asking for updates.












  • It reminds me too much of these moments in RTS games, or Sim City, that time you got hit hard and you have to rebuild, but don’t have resources to build, but to get more resources you need to build infrastructure. It can take so long to get out of that rut, and that’s of you don’t get hit by another calamity.

    Sometimes I think any policy maker should play a game of old school Sim City 2000 and we can all see how they do before we vote for them.